For real. It’s got the gqom sound palet, especially in the intro and the verses (the drum rolls, the whistles, the synths), but the chorus is firmly in the Kpop zone. Fantastic baby!
― breastcrawl, Friday, 24 August 2018 16:39 (five years ago) link
Heard it's meant to be a mix of traditional Korean sounds and the South African music hitman bang has on his ipod right now...
I like the production touches and "BTS as global commodity" visual messaging but the song feels thin on melodic ideas to me... more "Bang Bang Bang" than "Fantastic Baby" (if Bang Bang Bang was less dated-on-arrival).
What I do like about BTS is how quick the feedback loop is. Less than a year in from Love Yourself: Her setting sales records and rather than continue to tour that album, they already released the 2nd and 3rd acts wherein they tentatively/enthusiastically embrace their fame. It's the Kpop production schedule combined with a savvy sense of narrative and self-reference.
― hurricane weather (forapper), Saturday, 25 August 2018 20:25 (five years ago) link
DNA was their Fantastic Baby, obviously.
― hurricane weather (forapper), Saturday, 25 August 2018 20:26 (five years ago) link
Apart from my enthusiasm my exclamation was mainly inspired by the “ooh-hoo!” in the chorus. The guys were clearly thinking of BigBang and “Fantastic Baby” themselves. The song itself is somewhere halfway between FB and BBB, I guess.
― breastcrawl, Saturday, 25 August 2018 22:10 (five years ago) link
yeah the "ooh-hoo!" is straight from Fantastic Baby. the South African/traditional Korean blend is extremely effective here and i'm really glad they're doing something so fresh while at their peak, unlike their last few singles which have felt overly safe. i don't have any complaints about melodic ideas since it's driven so strongly by the rhythms and has plenty of hooks even if they aren't very melodic ones if that makes any sense
― ufo, Monday, 27 August 2018 06:54 (five years ago) link
Girls' Generation coming back (as 5) in September
― abcfsk, Monday, 27 August 2018 07:26 (five years ago) link
So then Seohyun and Sooyoung are out?
― hurricane weather (forapper), Monday, 27 August 2018 17:03 (five years ago) link
Going back to BTS, I think IDOL needs "something" more to be really good... but it is head and shoulders above most of the other songs on the BTS album which are, like, total snoozefests. So there's that.
― hurricane weather (forapper), Monday, 27 August 2018 18:51 (five years ago) link
yes...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQ8MFfg3DHA
― hurricane weather (forapper), Tuesday, 28 August 2018 03:53 (five years ago) link
Seohyun and Sooyoung left SM with Tiffany, yeah.
― abcfsk, Tuesday, 28 August 2018 08:18 (five years ago) link
hello k-pop thread, haven't had much time to post lately but just wanted to say how much i've been enjoying everything Hyolyn's put out this year. I think "Bae" might be my fave at the moment, so much summery goodness:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z2V4lymB6VU
― Roz, Thursday, 30 August 2018 17:50 (five years ago) link
yeah her singles this year have been great, See Sea is definitely my favourite though
― ufo, Friday, 31 August 2018 03:03 (five years ago) link
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNWMZIf7eSg
this is my favourite Sunmi solo single so far
also coming soon is a Blackpink & Dua Lipa collaboration! it'll be interesting to see if Blackpink attempt any sort of Western breakthrough then
― ufo, Tuesday, 4 September 2018 12:25 (five years ago) link
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sfkEbtHcooI
With credit to Our Girl Jamie for working so hard all these years to consolidate Jimin's fanbase... some of the best fanmade Kpop content on the English-language web!
All joking aside, the (long overdue) Jimin Park mini is solid. I like tracks 1, 2 and 4 especially. See if you can spot the Shine reference!
― hurricane weather (forapper), Wednesday, 5 September 2018 02:56 (five years ago) link
lol
― F# A# (∞), Wednesday, 5 September 2018 03:05 (five years ago) link
BTS was playing in downtown L.A. tonight and apparently they've sold out four shows here at Staples Center. People camping out in tents in the line waiting to see them.
― omar little, Wednesday, 5 September 2018 06:37 (five years ago) link
My friend wanted to see them at Citifield (where the Mets play), tickets were by lottery and we didn't get them. But I'm pretty agnostic on the new album so maybe we dodged a bullet.
― hurricane weather (forapper), Wednesday, 5 September 2018 21:05 (five years ago) link
Oh!GG Lil Touch isn't terrible but it's suffering pretty hard from every line being written twice so they can be divided 'fairly' between all 5 girls.
Either have a 3-girl subunit, work harder on the song structure, or forget about the distribution...
I like the new NCT Dream song though!
― hurricane weather (forapper), Wednesday, 5 September 2018 21:23 (five years ago) link
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LV1Es22E0RI
Supposedly Mark will be "graduated" from NCTDream after this song which is a bit weird to think about considering he's featured so heavily on it and even the other rappers sound like him. But just like Cube think they can have Pentagon without E'Dawn...
Here's an opinion piece on the NCT franchise model and other artist-as-commodity long term planning by SM:
https://omonatheydidnt.livejournal.com/22890849.html
Popular culture critic Kim Hyun Sik said, “In a franchise, the flagship store must be successful in order for its brand power to expand to its chain stores. It would be sequentially correct to develop a team that can be the center of NCT and then expand its influence to its derived teams.”
― hurricane weather (forapper), Wednesday, 5 September 2018 21:36 (five years ago) link
Would you buy a home AI system with Wendy's voice and image?
― hurricane weather (forapper), Wednesday, 5 September 2018 21:38 (five years ago) link
Sunmi's "Siren" rules <3 She does high drama so well.
― Roz, Thursday, 6 September 2018 13:20 (five years ago) link
Performance predictably great too
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hcBFktktV80
― abcfsk, Sunday, 9 September 2018 09:33 (five years ago) link
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RrvdjyIL0fA
iiking this track in the k-patchwork-pop tradition
― ufo, Monday, 10 September 2018 14:40 (five years ago) link
the OMG track is great, I hear a lot of other songs I like in there
― hurricane weather (forapper), Tuesday, 11 September 2018 01:13 (five years ago) link
the one that most comes to mind is GLAM's Party (XXO)
― ufo, Tuesday, 11 September 2018 01:17 (five years ago) link
also I Got A Boy
― ufo, Tuesday, 11 September 2018 02:37 (five years ago) link
Wow this is awful: https://www.soompi.com/article/1229651wpp/breaking-hyuna-edawn-removed-cube-entertainment
I could see them letting go of E'Dawn but Hyuna?! She practically carried the label.
― Roz, Thursday, 13 September 2018 02:55 (five years ago) link
wow that's awful and shocking, absurd that dating scandals are still such a thing and that companies can react like this over them
― ufo, Thursday, 13 September 2018 03:04 (five years ago) link
It just seems incredibly short-sighted. Hyuna was probably popular enough to ride out any dating scandals, while E'Dawn was a rising star. Good luck Cube imo.
― Roz, Thursday, 13 September 2018 03:14 (five years ago) link
i've seen some suggest that the issue was that Cube denied the dating rumours only for Hyuna & E'Dawn to publicly confirm they were dating afterwards and it seems Cube really didn't like that they did that
― ufo, Thursday, 13 September 2018 03:58 (five years ago) link
Yeah Cube's shares tanked after they went public (and is tanking now after this latest announcement).
I feel bad for Pentagon though - they were just starting to make waves. They don't deserve this.
― Roz, Thursday, 13 September 2018 05:09 (five years ago) link
lololol what a mess
[UPDATE] A senior official from CUBE Entertainment said the withdrawal of HyunA & E'Dawn is not final yet. The agency officials are having an urgent meeting & will gather the opinions from their artists as well https://t.co/yZlkxg3xhw pic.twitter.com/weppSv4c3U— The Seoul Story (@theseoulstory) September 13, 2018
― Roz, Thursday, 13 September 2018 08:26 (five years ago) link
If the point was to show Hyuna and E'Dawn who's boss, it backfired big time.
Pentagon are promoting right now and the song is pretty bad, but that might be because E'Dawn is not there to sell his Shine pt 2 co-write
― hurricane weather (forapper), Friday, 14 September 2018 02:37 (five years ago) link
The main thinh OMG's Remember Me reminds me of is f(x)'s Pinocchio
― hurricane weather (forapper), Saturday, 15 September 2018 19:54 (five years ago) link
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9RUeTYiJCyA
― ufo, Monday, 17 September 2018 11:04 (five years ago) link
I've never really been able to get into GOT7 but that's quite nice.
― Roz, Monday, 17 September 2018 15:00 (five years ago) link
I like it, it kinda sounds like Teenager (fan favorite off the last album): https://youtu.be/MPhAEcLaiNs
I think I'd like it more if it was just a touch more relaxed
― hurricane weather (forapper), Tuesday, 18 September 2018 01:45 (five years ago) link
dirrrrrrrty bass (but the chorus is poppy):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YROy48zGzW4
― hurricane weather (forapper), Tuesday, 25 September 2018 01:18 (five years ago) link
Doesn't quite stick the landing but I love the first 2 minutes of this...
― hurricane weather (forapper), Tuesday, 25 September 2018 01:20 (five years ago) link
https://soundcloud.com/bangtan/seesawxineedu
i like this way more than the components
― ufo, Saturday, 29 September 2018 18:39 (five years ago) link
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ekJOWBejSU
this is a very good r&b track with a great keyboard solo that i'd completely missed until now
― ufo, Tuesday, 2 October 2018 10:07 (five years ago) link
listened to the GOT7 album and it's really great, one of the best kpop full lengths i've heard. nearly every track could have been the single
this is one of the highlights
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P6rhxI80-FY
― ufo, Wednesday, 3 October 2018 01:12 (five years ago) link
Oh yeah Lee Jin Ah pitched as this piano genius could be very noodle-y but she's shown a great pop sensibility too, even in the songs where she IS doing jazz piano throughout
― abcfsk, Wednesday, 3 October 2018 05:49 (five years ago) link
Like
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WnniajBkORg
― abcfsk, Wednesday, 3 October 2018 05:50 (five years ago) link
Her album this year is beautiful
― abcfsk, Wednesday, 3 October 2018 08:49 (five years ago) link
I've been listening to a lot of Lee Jin Ah on my jazz(y) Kpop odyssey this year, it's bubbling up from the Korean underground to the idol scene.
Random is my favorite Lee Jin Ah track.
― hurricane weather (forapper), Friday, 5 October 2018 04:55 (five years ago) link
yeah her album was quite enjoyable too
― ufo, Friday, 5 October 2018 04:56 (five years ago) link
Working toward a theory of how these idol groups are positioned for an audience... not just on a cute/sexy axis for girlgroups (or a puppy love/possessive love axis for boygroups), but thinking about that axis in terms of the (sexual) agency allowed to the artist (the x axis), and also adding another axis for the age/sophistication of the target audience (the y axis).
So you can have a group with a pretty sophisticated presentation, using sounds from the indie scene or otherwise outside the idol scene, with MVs that use indie film tropes (clever transitions, artsy black and white, unexpected juxtapositions, or maybe tried indie tropes like filing at the laundromat), but because the artists are young, the target audience is also young (or are people who are into "young") - so the portrayal of the relationship will lack agency on the part of the artist, and they will be in the bottom left corner of the graph. (Ex: Infinite forever complaining about how they are controlled by Bad Girls, IU adding musical complexity while still appealing to the uncle fans, Stellar going meta about how they are objectified while being poked by computer mice in the music video).
The ultimate goal of this exercise is escape to the quadrant in the bottom right, where you can have a sophisticated image (y-axis) AND sexual agency (x-axis), the only way to retain fans after aging out of your original image, whatever it was (young and sophisticated, young and cute, or sexy but in a simplistic, 1-dimensional way). Because as an older artist, you not only want to be more true to your actual lived experience, but you also can't compete with the younger artists to be MORE cute or MORE inexperienced or in a MORE kdrama-rama relationship, right?
This isn't to say that the bottom right quadrant is actually more sophisticated or sexy, more that it's a Justin Timberlake going to "Suit and Tie" type of deal, where you successfully keep your audience into adulthood.
So examples of artists who succeeded here might be G.o.D, IU, Suzy from Miss A (and actually, Miss A as a whole, although they disbanded shortly thereafter), Taeyeon from Girls Generation, EXO-CBX and the other EXO subunits, Red Velvet, VIXX, Minah from Girl's Day, Sistar both as a group and as individual artists, Big Bang (maybe, they can also be self-reflective without being emotionally mature).
Just a thought, and since the pop culture website I used to write for went under, I figured I'd put it here.
― hurricane weather (forapper), Sunday, 7 October 2018 18:11 (five years ago) link
ANyway in the young but sophisticated (but lacking agency) quadrant we have MXM, who I am enjoying quite a bit these days:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qFszwM0WhNg
― hurricane weather (forapper), Sunday, 7 October 2018 18:12 (five years ago) link
Or it could be that this is the new young-and-cute puppy love quadrant, updated with what the kids are actually into these days.
― hurricane weather (forapper), Sunday, 7 October 2018 18:18 (five years ago) link